Future of World Capitalism

This page is a guide to entering details of a text. It explains what we call Metadata

When you enter a text - a book, article, web link, or other type of text, you need to provide additional information, or Metadata: 'Data about Data'. This allows other users to find it, refer to it in citations , in reading lists, and in bibliographies, all of which we plan to generate from this site.

This amounts to a series of additional pieces of information about the document that your entry refers to - for example, the publisher of a text or the year of publication. You can think of it as a library index, which in fact does the same thing. The internet community is in the process of standardising this librarian data, and we want to adhere as far as we can to this standard.

We use the metadata protocol for indexing submissions that has been developed and is maintained by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) which draws, in turn, on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol is the emerging standard for research, enabling OAI compliant search engines to create research indexes based on the resources from around the world. However, the journal's contents are also available through Google and other standard, web-wide search engines.

This means that when you generate readings lists or citations from the entries on this site, it can be transferred simply to other web applications such as Zotero, Google Scholars, and so on. Eventually, we will automate this process so you can generate citations lists and bibliographic entries with a single click. The Dublin Core consists of 15 metadata elements that are used to identify and describe documents.

The elements include traditional indexing terms for identifying documents, such as Author, Title, Description (Abstract), Subject, allowing for more detailed or granular indexing by also including elements such as Type, Coverage, and Sponsor. The Journal Manager and Editor of the journal have selected which metadata elements are appropriate for this journal and have provided examples of each — based on the journal's scope and focus — to guide Authors.

You should enter the abstract separately. The idea behind this is that actually, there are several different ways of summarising or talking about a text and so, we do not want to confine our users to a single one. If you go look at a text entry in detail, you will find in it a list of all the commentaries on it, and this includes abstract. However, you can enter, along with a Metadata, a brief description of it so that when people are browsing for it, they can get a picture of what it is. Think of this description as a sales tag, rather than a literary work.

You don't have to enter all the detailed information in the Dublin Core, and one of our plans is to have 'librarian' users (you're welcome to volunteeer) who will go through the data fixing up missing links. Who knows, we may find a 'bot for it. Until then, put in whatever you can - the more you add, th easier you make the life of other users.